Archives: Morning Breakouts

A BBC News article and related video examine the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo's battle with malaria. "'Malaria is the main killer here in Congo, especially for pregnant women and children,' says Dr. Vincker Lushombo, from Save the Children," BBC writes. "Two decades of conflict and chaos have destroyed key infrastructure and left many families in the east living in makeshift camps, often exposed to malarial swamps," according to the news service.

The January issue of the WHO Bulletin features an editorial on non-communicable diseases and post-conflict countries; a public health round-up; an article on Arab health professionals; a research paper on caesarean section rates in China; and a series of round table articles on the Global Fund and the interaction of public and private interests (January 2011).

"As the United States entered the traditional season of giving and renewal last month, President Barack Obama announced that the United States was increasing its emergency aid to the [Horn of Africa] region by $113 million," a VOA editorial states, adding, "The new monies will be used for food, health, shelter, water and other needs."

The new head of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Director-General Jos

The State Department has released a series of fact sheets examining the U.S. government's two-year progress in Haiti. One fact sheet examines government efforts to "lessen the severity of the [cholera] outbreak" in Haiti. Another fact sheet looks at the challenges of food security in Haiti, stating, "Even before the January 12, 2010 earthquake, Haiti faced significant challenges to food security.

In this post on USAID's "IMPACTblog," Erin McKee, USAID mission director for the Central Asian Republics, recounts a discussion roundtable with people "on the front lines" in the battle against HIV/AIDS in Kazakhstan. She writes, "I was honored to share a morning with people in Kazakhstan who are bold advocates for HIV-positive groups in their country, and I look forward to a renewed partnership with them in the fight to end stigma and discrimination toward people living with HIV in Central Asia" (12/27).

In this Huffington Post "Impact" blog post, Karl Hofmann, president and CEO of PSI, outlines 10 "milestones for the global health community" that occurred in 2011. Among the achievements, Hofmann says governments avoided making major cuts to foreign aid budgets despite a global economic downturn; studies supported "treatment as prevention" as an HIV prevention strategy; the number of malaria cases and deaths worldwide continued to decline; research showed a promising vaccine candidate to prevent malaria among children; and more women gained access to long-acting, reversible contraceptives. Hofmann also lists advances in social franchising; maternal health; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights; pneumonia prevention and treatment; and sanitation, hygiene and access to clean water (12/29).

"[T]he E.U., the Global Fund [to Fight] AIDS, TB and Malaria, and the World Bank's International Development Association ... want to save money during a fiscal crunch by cutting off aid to middle-income countries (MIC)," Andy Sumner and Amanda Glassman of the Center for Global Development write in the Guardian's "Poverty Matters Blog." However, doing so "means disconnecting foreign aid from most of the world's poor and sick," they write, adding, "At least three factors support the development of a more sophisticated approach."

Pharmaceutical company "Johnson & Johnson has rejected calls to offer patent rights on its HIV medicines to generic drug companies through a" Medicines Patent Pool, created to promote low-cost antiretroviral drugs in low-income countries and the development of new drug combinations and formulations, the Financial Times reports. "Paul Stoffels, worldwide head of pharmaceuticals at J&J, ... cautioned that the pool could trigger a 'mixing and matching' of medicines that would cause a rapid surge in patient resistance to innovative HIV drugs" that could "cause a huge disaster," according to the newspaper.

GlobalPost's "Global Pulse" blog describes a December seminar, titled "Global Health and Story Telling in the Digital Age" and sponsored by GlobalPost and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, at which "journalists discussed challenges they faced in covering global health during a time of shrinking budgets and within an industry struggling to balance hard-hitting coverage with the need to continually update websites and attract readers." According to the blog, "Global health reporting can and should be a 'window' into addressing the spectrum of challenges facing the world, from political to economic and scientific, journalists said" (Kriel, 12/28).

"The World Health Organization issued a stern warning on Friday to scientists who have engineered a highly pathogenic form of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus, saying their work carries significant risks and must be tightly controlled," Reuters reports (Kelland, 12/30). The agency "warned ... that while such studies were important, they could have deadly consequences," the New York Times writes (McNeil/Grady, 1/2).

In a year-end recap of major HIV-related headlines, IRIN/PlusNews writes, "It's been a roller coaster of a year in HIV and AIDS. AIDS turned 30 in 2011, and with new evidence of the effectiveness of HIV treatment as prevention, experts are increasingly talking about 'the end of AIDS.' At the same time, however, funding for HIV has become ever more uncertain, jeopardizing efforts to put new, life-saving science into action."

The ads have drawn strong criticism, but Children's Healthcare of Atlanta is standing by the effort.

"In India, a mass vaccination campaign involving more than a million volunteers reduced cases nationally by 94 percent between 2009 and 2010, from 741 to 42, and down to the single case last year," the Guardian reports, adding, "If in India as a whole there are no more confirmed cases before 13 January, the country will have completed its first year without a new victim. And if polio is gone from India, the only countries where the disease is still endemic would be Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan."